Standing Room Only

When Richmond fell in the spring of 1865, Jefferson Davis fled south to the hamlet of Danville, Va. There he held his last cabinet meeting in a local mansion, which proudly endures as "the last Capitol of the Confederacy." The old mansion has another use: it is the Danville Public Library. Last week that function was all but forgotten in a remarkable "integration" plan to keep readers with black skins off the premises.*

Last spring, exactly 95 years after the Confederacy died there, Negro high school students tried to use the whites-only library. Danville (pop. 35,000) promptly padlocked the place along with the smaller Negro branch two blocks away. When a federal judge ordered the library reopened on an integrated basis, the voters in a special election decided to keep it closed. A scheme to open a "private" library for whites proved impractical since the books belonged to the public, including Negro taxpayers. Danville has no real bookstore, and some of the citizenry began to miss books. They pressured the city council to reopen the library.

The council agreed, but on an odd basis. Literally adopting Author Harry (Only in America) Golden's whimsical plan for "vertical integration," the Danville Library was open for standees only. Every chair and table was gone. Next week all library cards will be canceled. To get a new card, the applicant must pay $2.50 and fill out a four-page form, listing everything from the type of books he plans to borrow to his college degrees, plus two character references and two credit references.

The new rules are even tougher than those in Russian libraries, which are tough enough. "Lunacy," commented the Richmond News-Leader. "Have members of Danville's city council, doing research on a term paper, ever read a book standing up? Have they ever read a book? If it is too much to ask in these situations for a lot of common sense, could we humbly ask for just a little common sense? If a measure of foolishness is unavoidable, do we have to break records?"

* Of the 9,900,000 Negroes in 16 Southern states, according to one recent estimate, some 3,000,000 have no access to public libraries.

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